Peter Trimbacher is a polite and softly spoken gent based at SAE in Brisbane. He’s also an accredited Ableton/ Logic instructor.

And with his new Electronic Music Production certificate course commencing on November 12, we thought it an opportune time to chat with him about it.

“After five years of teaching at SAE I still find myself absorbing knowledge from students and co-workers on a daily basis,” he says.

“I first got into music through breakdancing, believe it or not! I have always loved to dance and was listening to a lot of broken beat and that’s what the essence of dance was all about for me. It sort of evolved from there because the hip hop culture gained speed and started to feature more in the way of electronic instruments.”

Eventually, that interest in hip hop led to an interest in production. Which is a far cry from what he was doing prior — a course in Environmental Engineering. But when he found the clubbing culture, it formed the start of a creative streak that hasn’t let up since.

“It was like a discovery,” he explains. “I was being exposed to genres that weren’t being played on the radio and more and more, I wanted to get involved behind the scenes.”

So with the powerful Ableton software behind him, Peter has committed his life to helping create and build its user base.

“The software is all about the user base; that’s where it differs from Logic or Cubase. It is the user group that drives the improvements in performance and features. Ableton was born from the need to have a live performance — it is essentially a performance-centric program — and it is superior, in my opinion, to other programs. While many of them do the same stuff, the power and control of Ableton sets it apart.”

That said, the course isn’t based solely around Ableton. The college runs Logic and Ableton side by side, given they are somewhat complementary; and both systems are seen to be a good fit for teaching.

“Because when you teach something, it should be applicable across a number of digital workstations,” Peter says. “If something, features-wise, comes out on one, the others tend to pick it up if it’s successful. Our job is to explore the benefits of the software and that’s what we do during the course.”

For these reasons, the course is quite broad — it is aimed at building students from the ground up. If students have no knowledge of making music from a producer’s perspective, Peter argues they’d find the course useful because it is designed to run as such.

Yet while his Ableton course doesn’t require much in the way of prerequisite background work, he says the class can cater to the more advanced user who has used the software in the last two or three years.

“We’re about being part of the community. People have different needs for the software and we facilitate that. It’s a broad group of people and it’s designed to assist people at a pace that makes them feel comfortable.”

Peter is a music lover, producer and talented musician in his own right, and is kept busy with his own music as well as a label he is running in Australia.

“My background helps in providing a bit of a broad gamut of services in relation to the class and the teaching — we even have an Ableton user group here in Brisbane which we are running, and it caters to users of all music software. It’s pretty informal but it’s about bringing like-minded people together to assist them to do what they love!”

SAE’s fully accredited Certificate III in Music (Electronic Music Production) commences on Tuesday November 12.